Well I wont limit action cards to players of a certain career, but I will have a good reason from my player as to where he as a pit fighter suddenly knows the way of parting water without ever having seen an elf ect, roleplaying, thats what its all about.
To FFG: My concerns with WFRP3
A DM who allows a player to purchase an Action like Troll Feller Strike for a Commoner without any explanation or rationale is a BAD DM.
I swore that it says somewhere that you can't buy slayer actions without being one. It does for the swordmaster, waywatcher, wardancer, and ironbreakers.
Doc, the Weasel said:
I swore that it says somewhere that you can't buy slayer actions without being one. It does for the swordmaster, waywatcher, wardancer, and ironbreakers.
Scratch that. It's implied but not explicit and the FAQ says that you can get them all.
Still, I see it as easily remedied by GMing.
Necrozius said:
A DM who allows a player to purchase an Action like Troll Feller Strike for a Commoner without any explanation or rationale is a BAD DM.
I think you generalize all gaming groups by making a statement like that. If a group of players and a GM have fun anyway, how could you call him/her a bad GM. Not every constallation is the same and uses the same recepie for an successful night. Even if I on a personal level prefer story over action I've been playing in groups where storytelling been secondhand to pure action and theatrical sceens. In groups like this it's all about a few hours of fun and nobody cares if an dwarf would have an ancient elven relic as weapon as long it looks cool and have an epic name.
In my opinion you're never wrong if everyone in the group is enjoying your session.
ExInferis said:
In my opinion you're never wrong if everyone in the group is enjoying your session.
True.
My players expect a little more uniqueness to classes, so I'm pretty sure the special class abilities belonging only to that class, would just be assumed. To be a High Elf, they'll have to roll 4 hammers, and have a good concept and story for why their character left Ulthuan before they'll be able to make a High Elf. The reward for going through that is getting to be a Swordmaster who has unique skills. If I said anyone could learn a Wardancer Dance or a Slayer's Troll-feller strike, they'd just laugh at me.
They're long-time warhammer fans though, and love stuff that reinforces the lore and hate stuff that dilutes it.
Mal Reynolds said:
MY PROBLEM with the new edition is that all careers are general, their specifics are narrowed down to a single special career card.
Well my concerns were more at a foundational level. Once you rise to the rules level, there's a ton of houseruling I can do. The core Narrative/Simulationist balance is something FFG has to tune. All I can do is choose to buy modules and supplements that aid the type of campaign I like to run or those that leave me with more additional work.
As far as the individuality goes, here's what I was planning on doing.
1. Using the Fortune dice for race rolls.
No Hammer, 1 Hammer - Human
Two Hammers - Dwarf
Three Hammers - Wood Elf
Four Hammers - High Elf
2. Make the Slayer, Ironbreaker, Swordmaster, Wardancer abilities used only by those classes.
3. Eliminate those first four General Career Advances, and make all advances Open Career Advances only.
4. Require the player to fully finish the career (ie, take all advances not just 10, before they get the Career Talent permanently. (The 5 for Characteristic raising wouldn't count toward career advancement.)
That would help. If you wanted to change more, you could classify certain action cards as being for certain types of classes only (so maybe Honeyed Words could only be taken by a class with a Reputation slot, or the better combat techniques used only by classes with Tactics).
Of course at that point, you're starting to mess with the cards themselves, which might not be your cup of tea. Me, I'll change anything and everything if need be. 
Mmm, 1.2% High Elves. Now that's my sort of party.
HedgeWizard said:
To be fair Mal Reynolds (presumed captain of the Serenity); your concern that Commoner's can buy slayer action cards is easily handled by requiring that a character must be currently in the career or completed the career with the key words.
Have you played prior incarnations? The career system was just as open in many respects - nothing prevented a commoner from having an insanely high WS or BS, particularly if they rolled well in the beginning. I do agree that in the old system(s) the careers were often a little more individualistic since skills and advances were particular to each career, whereas in this new version, players can buy some generic advances along with the career specific ones. You also had more particular skills in the old versions, which has been changed to specializations. I do however think that this new version offers the PLAYER way more flexibility with developing their own character such that no two PCs sharing a career have similar stats and skills and abilities.
First huge fan of firefly. You got that right, 4 cudos points to you. 
And of course I could add common sense to the whole problem. And I will probably do that. But beside from my autorithy as a GM, nothing in the rules will back me up if I put my foot down. For the group I might come up bad, if I just say no, and essentially the players have the rules on their sides concerning traits. Of course they won`t ignore my autorithy as a GM but dissent will mount. We don`t like tyrannical GMs, but the lack of definitions and limits force me to take unpopular choices. More power is shifted to me (GM) instead of being clarified in the rules.
I quess the whole "openess" to WHFRP 3 will take some time to get used to. But our group will get the hang of it. It`s just the whole more-power-to-the-GM notion, that we are not used to. But we will get there, we will.
*sigh* sometimes I make a big fuzz of basically...nothing
UncleArkie said:
Well I wont limit action cards to players of a certain career, but I will have a good reason from my player as to where he as a pit fighter suddenly knows the way of parting water without ever having seen an elf ect, roleplaying, thats what its all about.
yeah, I got that, you can come a way long using common sense. And I like your perspective of it. But can you really hide all this behind roleplaying, without the chance of being challenged by players studying the rules? In my experience as GM and player, most players tend to respect the rules more than the a GM`s call, and often only when a particulary rule have been disected and interpreted, and still things are unclear, only than does the GM`s call have any impact . And the openess of the rules dictate that more power is shifted into the hands of the GM.
Luckily most GMs have sensible players, and this shift in power will go unoticed or unchallenged. But imaginate playing WHFRP with a bunch of rulelawyers?
...again I make a big fuzz of something that propably won`t be a problem in my group.
Lord Kruge said:
Mal Reynolds said:
MY PROBLEM with the new edition is that all careers are general, their specifics are narrowed down to a single special career card.
Well my concerns were more at a foundational level. Once you rise to the rules level, there's a ton of houseruling I can do. The core Narrative/Simulationist balance is something FFG has to tune. All I can do is choose to buy modules and supplements that aid the type of campaign I like to run or those that leave me with more additional work.
As far as the individuality goes, here's what I was planning on doing.
1. Using the Fortune dice for race rolls.
No Hammer, 1 Hammer - Human
Two Hammers - Dwarf
Three Hammers - Wood Elf
Four Hammers - High Elf
2. Make the Slayer, Ironbreaker, Swordmaster, Wardancer abilities used only by those classes.
3. Eliminate those first four General Career Advances, and make all advances Open Career Advances only.
4. Require the player to fully finish the career (ie, take all advances not just 10, before they get the Career Talent permanently. (The 5 for Characteristic raising wouldn't count toward career advancement.)
That would help. If you wanted to change more, you could classify certain action cards as being for certain types of classes only (so maybe Honeyed Words could only be taken by a class with a Reputation slot, or the better combat techniques used only by classes with Tactics).
Of course at that point, you're starting to mess with the cards themselves, which might not be your cup of tea. Me, I'll change anything and everything if need be.
Interesting way of handling character creation that is...
I will probably do something similar.
I will let each player roll for race, following the table in the rulebook. But instead of choosing between the valiable choices of that roll, they can pass on and place the choices into an "available races for the group". So basically all players roll, we jot down the results and than everybody pick among the available races that where rolled.
Other than that, we have to in advance agree on what limitations we will have on action cards, talents cards and so on.
But I feel your ruling on point 4, is a bit harsh. spending advances in play on primary characteristics should count toward career advancement. Otherwise you risk that players spend an awfull lot of xperience in a single career, and forcing them to stay in that career a very long time. OR they might not invest advances at all in characteristics, and just stick to talents, skills, wounds, fortune, and stances in order to complete their career. I`d advise you to think this through, since that ruling will have a great impact on character building process.
have fun playing though
Mal Reynolds said:
But I feel your ruling on point 4, is a bit harsh. spending advances in play on primary characteristics should count toward career advancement.
What I meant was that since they need to finish the career completely, ie, take all the possible advances, not just get 10 advances to get the permanent bonus, raising a characteristic wasn't mandatory in order to "finish" a career. Either getting a Fortune die for a Characteristic or raising it would count towards finishing the career. I wasn't causing them to waste 5 advances, I was saving them 5 advances.
I might make the Characteristic raise variable, instead of always 5, make it a number of advances equal to the new rating.
Lord Kruge said:
Mal Reynolds said:
I might make the Characteristic raise variable, instead of always 5, make it a number of advances equal to the new rating.
That is the rule already per Characteristic Upgrades on page 37 of the rulebook.
mac40k said:
@Gorehammer - what rule are you looking for?
The section on Maneuvers includes movement, which discusses changing range increment and the number of maneuvers required to change range increments. It further states that when covering long distances where multiple maneuvers are required that the character is not considered to be in the new range increment until all required maneuvers have been performed, while noting that all maneuvers do not have to be performed on the same turn.
The section on Abstract Measurement which immediately follows says that the distance between two points (emphasis mine) is defined in broad range categories and then defines those categories.
The section on resolving movement and positioning states that standups or figures in base contact are engaged and the the further apart they are, the greater the range between them. It also notes that the GM can place tracking tokens between individual standups or engagements to indicate how far apart from each other those two elements (again emphasis mine) are. The example above that shows tokens being used to indicate the range between A and B and between A and C. The range between B and C is not shown since that information is not relevant.
Your problem was two fold in that it appears you were using tokens to denote number of maneuvers rather than range increments, and that you noted the range from A to B and B to C, but not the range from A to C. You were trying to infer the range of A to C from the other two noted ranges. Since range is abstract, if you need to know the range between two points (A and C), you must specify it rather than try to derive it from the ranges between other sets of two points.
As for the Wood Elf, if he uses a maneuver to move deeper into the woods and he was at medium or long range from his target to start, he is still that same range since moving a single maneuver away from another point at either of those ranges is not sufficient to change his range increment. The key is you have to know how far he was to start with to determine when he has spent sufficient maneuvers for his range increment to change (assuming he were to keep moving away). Furthermore, simply moving deeper into the woods does not allow him to hide. He would need to spend a maneuver to engage a tree or something to hide.
But that means that you need to keep track of the distance between each 2 characters and also of the relative place of each character inside his specific range increment (how many manoeuvers he needs to reach the next increment - and whether he's moving closer or further away from a specific point).
This all sounds VERY complicated; actually it's impossible to keep track of if you don't use a grid.
So what's the deal?
Gorehammer said:
And also, wow, that's a lot more complicated than tactical movement. I'm beginning to wonder if FFG didn't shoot themselves in the foot design-wise with the "abstract" movement. I don't see the benefit of this over using miniatures and a grid or measuring ranges like in 2nd ed. other than people can say it's not a board game since it has no board. (Not that a board makes a boardgame, I have said this since people came crashing down on this edition with that idiotic complaint from since before the game was released.)
timwil said:
But that means that you need to keep track of the distance between each 2 characters and also of the relative place of each character inside his specific range increment (how many manoeuvers he needs to reach the next increment - and whether he's moving closer or further away from a specific point).
This all sounds VERY complicated; actually it's impossible to keep track of if you don't use a grid.
The abstract movement system works when you have an easily defined central engagement that everyone is measured against, a spoke and wheel configuration, then it's very easy to just say the distances between the spokes are "irrelevant". Of course the average real combat is going to be much more chaotic and spread out. In your classic "bandit ambush" pattern with 2-3 different ranged attackers all spread out, with maybe a central melee contingent, it will be an absolute mess to handle with abstract tokens, especially once the "irrelevant" excuse is taken off the table. You can try to deal with such an encounter by placing range tokens everywhere and constantly adjusting or just glance once at a grid and see exactly where everything is, no muss, fuss or argument.
Lord Kruge said:
Gorehammer said:
And also, wow, that's a lot more complicated than tactical movement. I'm beginning to wonder if FFG didn't shoot themselves in the foot design-wise with the "abstract" movement. I don't see the benefit of this over using miniatures and a grid or measuring ranges like in 2nd ed. other than people can say it's not a board game since it has no board. (Not that a board makes a boardgame, I have said this since people came crashing down on this edition with that idiotic complaint from since before the game was released.)
timwil said:
But that means that you need to keep track of the distance between each 2 characters and also of the relative place of each character inside his specific range increment (how many manoeuvers he needs to reach the next increment - and whether he's moving closer or further away from a specific point).
This all sounds VERY complicated; actually it's impossible to keep track of if you don't use a grid.
The abstract movement system works when you have an easily defined central engagement that everyone is measured against, a spoke and wheel configuration, then it's very easy to just say the distances between the spokes are "irrelevant". Of course the average real combat is going to be much more chaotic and spread out. In your classic "bandit ambush" pattern with 2-3 different ranged attackers all spread out, with maybe a central melee contingent, it will be an absolute mess to handle with abstract tokens, especially once the "irrelevant" excuse is taken off the table. You can try to deal with such an encounter by placing range tokens everywhere and constantly adjusting or just glance once at a grid and see exactly where everything is, no muss, fuss or argument.
But how do you know just by looking at a grid how far apart things are? Do you assign a number of squares on the grid to be equal to each of the range increments? If so, then don't you have to count squares between any two individuals/objects to determine the range? I don't see how that is easier than just looking at two tokens between two figs and knowing that they are at long range from one another (I don't bother with tokens between figs at close range, so 1 = medium, 2 = long, 3 = extreme). Not to mention that depending on how many squares you assign to a range increment, the table space necessary for multiple individuals/objects to be located at extreme range from one another would be a lot more than the space needed for a few tokens. I guess I just don't have a problem describing the scene and winging the ranges as things shift. If a player is facing multiple bandits that are spread out in front of him, one to the left, one to the right, and one straight ahead. He's at medium range to all of them intends to move towards one. If for some reason he wants to know if that will also move him closer to the others or keep him at the same range, or move him further away, I can tell him that. No grid necessary.